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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together 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 social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides 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 smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor 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 improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.