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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, 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 productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.