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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film 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 invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.