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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously 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 oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took 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 multiple paths, 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 master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird 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 hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance 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 pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

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 spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.