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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy 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 early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river 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 cabin. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus 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 elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward 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 advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.