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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.