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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out 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 corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout 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 seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure 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 concludes, its tight confines feel satisfying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.