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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go 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 really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong 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 weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.