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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.