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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific 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 creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become 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 typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.