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In recent years, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to long-term codependence (United) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's evident that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together represents a fresh tier of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) begins 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 learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she seems hopeful about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are neither as filled with red flags or as suspiciously perfect as other current figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often partially blocked, shown from strange angles, or framed in scenes with a disconcerting amount of empty space. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she phones when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took psychedelics; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed role as the female in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in multiple directions, its horror elements blended in a surreal 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 productive run for the last year and a half with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the creepiest early moments are moments just out of focus or in the periphery of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, at its core, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As smart as so many current scary films are, they often script for theme rather than shooting toward instant impact. As a result, some are lacking innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

The director also appears to know what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a woman on the brink of oblivion. Liz becomes alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously sidesteps asking what the hell is happening.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the shorthand of both her familiarity and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her traumatic history is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and unlikely to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a way that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare stories do not always achieve: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to stay so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.