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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting 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 do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.