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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked 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 not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.