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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream 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 by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause 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 one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.