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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor 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 oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) 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 diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

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 woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: 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 quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.