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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay 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 companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman 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 straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.