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In recent years, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

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 recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are seldom outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, viewed from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she hears soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable 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 informs a friend she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its horror elements blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to bend that story into a contemporary relationship parable. As clever as so many current horror movies are, they often script for message rather than filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to become abstract woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic history awaits, the figure still seems fully realized.

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 innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper debuts in cinemas on 14 November.