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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if 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 doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause 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 makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not 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.