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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.