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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist 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 initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those elements 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 perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.