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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded 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) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.