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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies 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) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. 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 prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague 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 perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.