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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan 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 eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.