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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.