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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned 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 brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer 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 scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances 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 Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase 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 written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer 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 speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.