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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly 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 modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.