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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like 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 lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.