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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "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 doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.