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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.