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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies 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) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie 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. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.