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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (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 discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.