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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent 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 lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on November 14th.