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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.