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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple 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 audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.