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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.