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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.