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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor 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, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.