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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.