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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor 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 describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.