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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 manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half 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 eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.