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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended 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 productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.