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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.