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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run 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 creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.