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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together 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 streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do 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 role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.