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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous 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 painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.