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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements 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 typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history 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 or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.