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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed 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 mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike 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 productive run 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.