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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 manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier of terror.

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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat 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 nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components 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 streak for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, 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 tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.