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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.