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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures 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 oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like 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 lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.