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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 (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (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 brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.