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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest 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 serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.