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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current 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 oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.