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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

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 highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things 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 inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.