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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of terror.

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 together for about a year, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, 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 eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true 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 seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.