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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element 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 character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.