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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? 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 discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently script toward theme instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.