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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period 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 nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.