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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (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 serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.