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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes 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 slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; 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 go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer 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 an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.