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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

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 new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities 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 discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes 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 love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel 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 acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.