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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time 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 filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery 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 diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.