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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed 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 thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – 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 trip? 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, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical 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 brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.