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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film 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 freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.