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Over the past few seasons, 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 (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities 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 comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises 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 rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.