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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended 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 prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.