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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.