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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult 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 vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different 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 new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn 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 manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.