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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes 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 tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.