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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, 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 horror specialist 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 in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.