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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 about a year, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.