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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie 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 hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze 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 phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.