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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film 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 knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing 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 by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts 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 stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded 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 off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on November 14th.