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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.