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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, 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.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.