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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired 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, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.