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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier 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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become 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 virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.