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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.