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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern 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, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.