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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative 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 micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems 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 generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.