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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest 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 freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.