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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier 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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.