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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together 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 last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong 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 does get freaked out 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 mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.