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In recent years, horror cinema has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's clear that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of fright.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as dotted with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're frequently partially blocked, viewed from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the adjacent stream rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she phones when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This diversity, paired with Keeper's mysterious and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film feel to some like a shell game intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often write toward message instead of filming for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for original imagery, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of authentic, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to push those components without permitting the movie to become vague mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the usual virtuoso demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is written and acted with a certain directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies 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 tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: maybe it requires a fable-like horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on 14 November.