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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion 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 deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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 within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.