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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, 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 previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, 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 over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.