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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a new tier 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 new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined 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, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for message instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.