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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.