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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.