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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not 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.