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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie 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 thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, 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 nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.