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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.