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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor 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 dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird 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.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze 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 friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.