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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay 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 friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.