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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "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 – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game 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 viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.