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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

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 new 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 bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in 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, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal 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 run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.