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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking 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 well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike 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 streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo 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 typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.