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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level 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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel 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 emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, 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 recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.