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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds 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, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.