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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.