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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, 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 phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.