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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, 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 previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie 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 compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.