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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike 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 another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.