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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie 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 hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint 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 transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.