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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities 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 seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, 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 past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; 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 secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract 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 usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.