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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.