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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect 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 explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.