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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents 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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history 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 nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.