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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded 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 annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.