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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.