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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned 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 comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.