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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs 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) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.