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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.