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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, 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 past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (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 previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (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 unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.