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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical masterful showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.