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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified 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 filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus 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, combined 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 fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague 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 virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.