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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy 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 marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds 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, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward message instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.