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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film 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. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions 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 creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods 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 another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.