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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful 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 idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes 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 fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.