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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know 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 brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable 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 manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.