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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from 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 red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.