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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to twist that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears 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 oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, 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 concludes, its compact structure seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.