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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive 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. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river 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 friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended 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 audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.