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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie 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 knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) 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 tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.