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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.