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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.