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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing 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 typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.