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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned 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 brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (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 previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso 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 character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.