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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh 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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen 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 provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.