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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away 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 discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.