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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical 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 masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.