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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

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 recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem 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 completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (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 tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes 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 horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.