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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current 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 cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go 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 really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize 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 does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.