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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.