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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly 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 twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.