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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river 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 cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended 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 productive run for the last year and a half with another movie 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 extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, 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 plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes 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 business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.