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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film 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. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

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 desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences 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 inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.