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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). 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 concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.