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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history 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 or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.