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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels 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 seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems 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 experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.