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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (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 discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film 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 corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.