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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 run 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 initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.