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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (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 spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.