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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

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 highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. 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 an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.