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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.