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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives 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 nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer 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 scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.