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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent 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 acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.