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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock 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 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 bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult 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 eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the character still feels 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.