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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry 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 elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.