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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, 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 eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer 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 latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.