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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified 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 filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue 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 complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.