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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, 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 pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.