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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "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 psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.