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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, 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 cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.