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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate 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 dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.