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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite 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 traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex 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 follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.