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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, 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 last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward 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 audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write toward message rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful 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 or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.