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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

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 original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.