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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.