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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

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 recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.