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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring 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 neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.