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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

The director introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby 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 phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.