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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.