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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak 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 early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.