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In recent years, scary movies has often explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a isolated spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are not as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, 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 creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad 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, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the vision) and outside the narrative; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to push those elements without allowing the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously avoids asking what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history is revealed, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt messaging of other dating-hell stories don't always manage: perhaps it takes a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.