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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.