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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) 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 venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable 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 informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing 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 do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.