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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like 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.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance 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 unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.