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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes 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 bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.