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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? 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, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems 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 female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich 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 tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.