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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems 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 leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.