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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion 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 deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go 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 trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, 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.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.