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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like 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 cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.