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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled 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 serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.