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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical 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 showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.