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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, 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 master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.