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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.