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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments 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 Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for theme rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.