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In recent years, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend 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 deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, 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 horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.