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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.