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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status 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 mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer 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 shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue 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 rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.