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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier 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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple 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 trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, 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 past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.