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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.