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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.