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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie 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, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike 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 productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect 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 modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role 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 additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.