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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan 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 fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. 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 completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems 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 terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak 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 initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies 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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.