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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.