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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful 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 perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.