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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears 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 perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.