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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat 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 cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.