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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on 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 marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes 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 friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.