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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.