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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.