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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half 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 out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) 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 quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies 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 seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.