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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend 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 intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way 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 feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.