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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.