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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.