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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair 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 family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river 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 friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies 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 seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.