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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.