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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended 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 due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

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 seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.