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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, 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 or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing 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 – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific 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 most unsettling 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 stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, 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 tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.