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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor 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 love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares 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 initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious 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 generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.