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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily 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 uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs 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.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.