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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period 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 not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.