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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.