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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, 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 early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, 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 creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.