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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new 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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game 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 refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.