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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures 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 forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery 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 elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.