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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor 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 clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.