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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.