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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling 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 vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.