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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past 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 or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.