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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

The director brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.