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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, 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 relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.