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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "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.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements 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 productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus 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 diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out 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 scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.