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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 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 understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.