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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.