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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) 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, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.