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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.