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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel 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 makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.