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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, 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 luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. 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 last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

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 compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.