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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists 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 unforgettable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the stylistically different murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current scary films are, they often script toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, surprising contrasts or a feeling of genuine, strange enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the figure still seems 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 innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.