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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.