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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.