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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly 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 early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently somewhat obscured, viewed from strange perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable overlay of the adjacent stream flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it emphasizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script for theme instead of filming toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, unexpected contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to advance those elements without permitting the movie to turn into abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual masterful showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected moments: a cynical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the character still seems complete.

The same applies of the movie as a whole, 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 finishes up, its compact structure seem gratifying, correct and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales do not always manage: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.