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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.