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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for message rather than filming toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.