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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same 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 romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.