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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 chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.