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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film 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. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting 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 luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 corner 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 eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is 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 twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic 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 nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.