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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes 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 scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.