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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable 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 companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple 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 horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.