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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences 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 sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.