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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.