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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, 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 one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.