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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.