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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. 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 rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie 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 compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.