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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "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 avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative 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 ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.