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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like 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 acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike 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 streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.