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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 together for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on November 14th.