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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike 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 productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.