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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, 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 master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry 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 elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.