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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds 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 go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components 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 perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.