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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich 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 seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.