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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing 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 by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.