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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, 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 uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.