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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.