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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences 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 sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes 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 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 complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.