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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly 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 nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation 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 river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.