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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period 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 neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.