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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.