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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation 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 early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult 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 extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo 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 verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.