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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.