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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, 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 eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.