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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely 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 friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components 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 prolific 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 creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.