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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences 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 mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on November 14th.