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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord 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, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.