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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality 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 shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird 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 mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.