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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things 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 inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific 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 complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.