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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising 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 scary film 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 initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.