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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (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 previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. 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 stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.