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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (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 spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates 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 posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences 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 heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.