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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together represents a new level of fright.

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 highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover early on has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint noises through the house's vents. 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 informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly 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 plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.