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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head 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 terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak 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 most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.