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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning 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 quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.