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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed 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 mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.