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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. 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: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.