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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

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 paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.