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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded location together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish 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 way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.