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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.