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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting 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 do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.