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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely 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 tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled 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 periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.