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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, 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 past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.