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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears 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 trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.