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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.