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In recent years, horror cinema 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 evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of 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 past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.