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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies 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) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick 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 prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.