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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot 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) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.