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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists 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 unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "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 did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.