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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific 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 early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful 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 scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.