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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the nearby 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 by herself at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently write toward message rather than shooting for immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.