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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent 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 by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding 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 frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.