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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled 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 close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments 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 Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.