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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness 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 painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.