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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags 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 slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes 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 well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.