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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies 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) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.