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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.