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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.