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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh 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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes 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 luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.