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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie 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. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments 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, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.