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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby 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 inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus 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 Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring 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 emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.