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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. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.