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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new 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 a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. 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 deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal 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 past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed 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 sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.