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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

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 female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film 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 tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.