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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head 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 master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts 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 outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.