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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly 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 initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance 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 – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely 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 achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.