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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.