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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling 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 luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.