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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream 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 calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.