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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry 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 horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.