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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem 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 outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby 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 phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.