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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes 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 horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.