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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. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together 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 social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.