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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into unhealthy relationships with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright 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 trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if 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 lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? 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 tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary 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 genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.