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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.