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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.