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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned 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 brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. 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 scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: 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 quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.