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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives 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 nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears 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 female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.