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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "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 psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.