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In recent years, horror cinema has often explored toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a fresh tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 a couple for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, dry comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a trend of confusion that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her friend inquires if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest initial scenes 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 horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write for theme instead of shooting for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to do the typical masterful showcase of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) However Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her unseen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems complete.

That's true 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 standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel satisfying, correct and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always manage: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film debuts in cinemas on 14 November.