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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.