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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently explored toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a pair venturing to a isolated location together represents a new tier of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has marked the period Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are not as dotted with warning signs nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent figures in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his camera work, rather than micro-aggressions or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or composed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of headroom. This creates a trend of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's posh tub, there's an intensely unforgettable overlay of the nearby stream rushing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a friend she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her friend asks if she did psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed role as the woman in Malcolm's world – appears like it could go in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal jumble. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are moments just blurry or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the latest release feel to some like a shell game designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it emphasizes its physical impact on an audience above a wish to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write toward theme rather than filming for instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising juxtapositions or a feeling of authentic, strange mystery. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague woo-woo self-indulgence.

The director also appears to know what a powerful stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the brink of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange occurrences that take place around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a particular directness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her unseen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her painful past is revealed, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a sequel. That neatness drives home some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare stories don't always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the messy affair of relationships to stay so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in theaters on 14 November.