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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a new 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 highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run 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 initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize 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 verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.