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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.