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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; 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 elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.