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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (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, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue 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 complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.