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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.