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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, 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 spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.