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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed 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 romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps 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 gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.