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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.