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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears 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 rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.