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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently explored toxic romance with the same fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to chronic emotional reliance (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a new level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, 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 oddly idyllic as other recent characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of micro-aggressions or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely hidden, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of confusion that continues as Liz thinks she perceives soft sounds through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable 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 companion she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple directions, 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 horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they frequently write for message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that happen around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell stories don't always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.