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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. 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 due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, 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 previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script for message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.