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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, 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 angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.