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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.