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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away 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 quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female 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 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (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 thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.