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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level 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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.