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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.