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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes 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 awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.