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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond 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 did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.