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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river 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 lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: 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 speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.