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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.