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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.