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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing 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 cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

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 woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed 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 asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.