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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.