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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie 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 tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.