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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together signifies a new level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past awaits, the character still feels complete.

That's true 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 original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always manage: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on November 14th.