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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments 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 eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history 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 nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely 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 tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.