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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new 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. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak 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 creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.