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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half 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 corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing 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 doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.