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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.