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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored 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 mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie 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 appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel 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 refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance 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 off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.