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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple traveling to a secluded spot together signifies a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs or as suspiciously perfect as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright hidden, but they're frequently partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This creates a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she hears faint sounds through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby 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 asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just blurry or in the corner of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward message rather than shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those components without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

He also seems to know 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 doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to generate a sequel. That neatness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other dating-hell stories do not always achieve: maybe it requires a mythical horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.