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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of fright.

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 much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby river rushing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or 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 unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.