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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.