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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.