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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, 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 past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.