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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.