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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation 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 superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.