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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive 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 early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious 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 generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.