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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together 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 streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, 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 wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.