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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters 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 describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh 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 tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. 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 – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie 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 compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.