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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (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 new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components 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 doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level 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 shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.