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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than 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 composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.