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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

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 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 bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (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 introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.