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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films 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 marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend 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 or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.