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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.