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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "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 straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written 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 provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.