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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor 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 love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest 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 serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick 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 above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze 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 call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.