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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.