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In recent years, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive scary film 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 initial moments together are not as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact 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 hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from odd angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives soft sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the adjacent river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in any number of paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently write for message instead of shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are starved for original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

The director also appears to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual virtuoso demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird things that happen around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably sidesteps asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past awaits, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.