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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic 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 idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition 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 informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 in-movie (so many of the creepiest 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 eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.