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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run 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 most unsettling early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.