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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive 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 optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "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 role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward theme rather than filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels complete.

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 improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.