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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.