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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like 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 acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? 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 within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.