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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.