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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) 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 location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition 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 calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry 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 diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong 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 alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected 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 quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.