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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists 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 memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home 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 messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.