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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the similar intensity as a cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it's clear that love affairs are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded spot together represents a new level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for approximately twelve months, which we discover quickly has marked the period Liz has bolted from past relationships. Nevertheless, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their initial moments together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly perfect as other recent figures in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a somewhat slurred-together way of speaking as he explains some peculiarities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a eerie cousin who lives close by). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins introduces discord through his camera work, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright hidden, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from strange perspectives, or framed in shots 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 air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's posh bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the adjacent river flowing all around her, like she's about to transcend reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she calls when she's left alone at the cabin. Her acquaintance inquires if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – titled after Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in multiple paths, its horror elements mixed together in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific streak for the last year and a half with an additional film due out next year, complicates efforts 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 outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct serial-killer freakout Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could cause the latest release seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward scary narrative.

Maybe it is exactly that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so invigorating is the way it prioritizes its physical impact on an audience above a desire to twist that plot into a contemporary love allegory. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often write for theme instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are lacking original imagery, surprising contrasts or a sense of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses all of this, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague mystical self-indulgence.

He also seems to recognize what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to do the typical virtuoso showcase of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz does get alarmed by the strange things that happen 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 heck is happening.) However Maslany provides a second level to her performance in her unguarded times: a skeptical glance of her gaze in one direction or another, the fragility of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and quickness to annoyance with her off-screen friend on the phone. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past is revealed, the character still feels fully realized.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper concludes, its compact structure feel satisfying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other dating-hell tales don't always manage: perhaps it requires a mythical horror for the complicated affair of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film arrives in theaters on 14 November.