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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult 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 vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.