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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (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 level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious 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 pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.