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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new tier of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters 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 fact that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing 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 left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. 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 productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those elements without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird things 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 inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a sequel. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.