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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments 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 Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.