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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "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 straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.