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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

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 finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.