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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released 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 bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.