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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents 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) 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 learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like 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 did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding 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 paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? 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 initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.