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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, 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 fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing 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 mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.