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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

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 scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing 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 by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.