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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of terror.

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 learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent 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 well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny 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 recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.