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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; 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 marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.