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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

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 much-concealed 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. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.