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In recent years, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From 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 pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout 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 dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides 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 courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue 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 complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.