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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces 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 somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts 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 extra-textually; 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 mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.