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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. From engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together signifies 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom completely hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no specific master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still feels complete.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.