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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort 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 faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears 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 becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.