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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, 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 extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.