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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.