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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier 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 horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs or as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they frequently write toward theme rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.