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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film 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 hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious 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 spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.