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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's evident that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a couple venturing to a isolated location together signifies a new 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 new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for approximately twelve months, which we learn early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears hopeful about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a somewhat mumbled accent as he describes some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives close by). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

Osgood Perkins introduces tension through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or backstory.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd angles, or framed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a trend of disorientation that persists as Liz thinks she perceives soft noises through the house's air ducts. When she unwinds in the house's posh bath, there's an deeply unforgettable overlay of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a companion she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed role as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could head in multiple directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, makes it difficult to tell, both in-movie (so many of the creepiest initial scenes are moments just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive ad campaign, could cause the new film feel to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many contemporary scary films are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting toward instant impact. Consequently, some are lacking innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a feeling of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how far to push those components without allowing the movie to turn into vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of oblivion. Liz does get freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the heck is going on.) However Maslany delivers a second level to her performance in her unprotected moments: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its compact structure seem satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That neatness emphasizes some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious messaging of other romantic nightmare tales don't always manage: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.