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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing 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 friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.