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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent 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 calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments 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 fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.