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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies 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) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities 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 appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.