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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (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 horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.