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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh 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 highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal 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 prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.