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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing 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 by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments 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 murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.