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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.