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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together 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 awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.