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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. From engineered first encounters (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that love affairs are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we discover quickly has signified the period Liz has fled past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with warning signs or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently somewhat blocked, shown from strange angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she hears faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely memorable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding directly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in multiple paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike jumble. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that plot into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often write for message instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny mystery. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins knows just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into abstract mystical excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the character still seems fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a way that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.