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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 (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent 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 acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended 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 invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. 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 elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.