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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period 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 dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.