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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated spot together represents a new tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags nor as oddly perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable 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 friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run 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 early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a wish to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of filming toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.