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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "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 doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.