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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.