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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition 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 companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.