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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

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 much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller 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 seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.