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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands 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 ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing 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 inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – 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 really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.