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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems 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 suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, 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 plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.