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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal 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 productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (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 serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.