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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, 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 companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head 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 terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

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 oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.