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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed 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 bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.