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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current 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 cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy 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 intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.