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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.