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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal 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 rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.