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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (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.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time 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 dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know 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 brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie 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 compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness 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 mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.