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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.