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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery 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, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.