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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location 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) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.