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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby 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 friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.