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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong 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 oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.