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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.