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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation 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 learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for message rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.