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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay 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 companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past 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 or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.