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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor 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, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.