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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, 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 wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.