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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive 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 thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, 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 stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.