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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific 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 early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is 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 bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.