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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.