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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair 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 short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus 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 eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.