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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral 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 brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak 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 moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.