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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.