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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled 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 social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad 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, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.