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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags 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 slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend 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 asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.