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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if 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 cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.