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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

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 period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes 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 mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.