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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock 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 together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears 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 adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate 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 tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.