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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie 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 micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like 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 did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 creepiest 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 elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.