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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies 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) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond 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 – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.