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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic 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 perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like 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 did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct 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 dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.