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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly idyllic 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 explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film 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 finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.