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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a wish to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than filming toward immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical 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 woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the figure still feels complete.

The same applies 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.