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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period 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 not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.