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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded 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) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film 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. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.