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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. 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 productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, 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 concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.