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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.