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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward theme rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the call. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.