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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels 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 rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if 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 cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive 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 most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.