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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.