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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond 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 asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the figure still seems 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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.