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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent 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 explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.