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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.