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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, 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 reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.