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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. 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 far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get 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 inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.