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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.