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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire 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 toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.