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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, 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 creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed 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 provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.