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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level 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 new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs 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 way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative 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 subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true 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 concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.