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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) 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 venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner 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 diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.