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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive 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 blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy 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 pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for theme rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.