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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) 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 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 learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write for message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.