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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, 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 compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.