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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.