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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.