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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation 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 intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent 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 phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts 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 vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out 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 scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.