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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.