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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (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 camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

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 viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.