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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? 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, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.