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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.