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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible 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, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.