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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply 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 informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.