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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.