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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor 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 mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing 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 left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force 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 does get alarmed by the weird 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 avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.