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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored unhealthy relationships with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex 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 feel satisfying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.