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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies 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 leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.