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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable 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 learn quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from odd angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (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 thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme rather than filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.