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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for 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 dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.