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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy 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, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into 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 typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers 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 polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.