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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.