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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out 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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.