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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out 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 extra-textually; his last two films 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 make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.