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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like 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 acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences 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 asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.