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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly 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 awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.