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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current 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 describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.