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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.