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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film 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 feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.