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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.