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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities 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 discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.