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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head 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 trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.