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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, 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 narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.