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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.