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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar fervor as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair venturing to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we learn quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible 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, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer above a wish to twist that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they often script toward theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is written and acted with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, 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 finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its ideas in a way that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on November 14th.