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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From 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 gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.