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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar fervor as a doomed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a isolated location together represents a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the recently released and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover early on has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as filled with red flags nor as suspiciously perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the fact that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

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

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely outright hidden, but they're often partially blocked, viewed from odd perspectives, or framed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that persists as Liz believes she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's left alone at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the woman in Malcolm's life – seems like it could go in any number of directions, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal jumble. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive run for the past 18 months with another movie due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling initial scenes are instances just blurry or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his last two films were the stylistically different serial-killer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film seem to some like a shell game intended to embellish what is, at its core, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But one aspect of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it emphasizes its visceral effect on an audience above a desire to bend that plot into a contemporary relationship parable. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they often script toward theme instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper has all of this, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical self-indulgence.

The director also appears to recognize what a strong grounding element he has in Maslany, who isn't called upon to perform the usual virtuoso showcase of a female on the brink of oblivion. Liz does get alarmed by the weird occurrences that happen around her, and the character is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who inexplicably avoids inquiring what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous smiles, the abbreviated of both her familiarity and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as complex as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• Keeper arrives in cinemas on 14 November.