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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, 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 over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.