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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.