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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together 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 believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience over a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary scary films are, they often write for theme instead of filming for immediacy. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on November 14th.