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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances 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 fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.