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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.