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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together 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 not as dotted 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 slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended 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 past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.