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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, 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 tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.