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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

The director introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft 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 informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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 tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.