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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). 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 seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby 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 by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, 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 physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.