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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. 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 completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if 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 asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together 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 prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.