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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted 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 slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled 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 corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong 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 freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.