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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier 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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend 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 avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.