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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, 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 creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "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 doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems 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 brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.