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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 (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot 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) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. 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 expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.