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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies 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 make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular 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 nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.