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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Partner) to long-term codependence (United) to the rare happy ending (Heart Eyes), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a secluded spot together represents a fresh level of terror.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and highly secretive scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn quickly has signified the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She thinks she understands Malcolm quite thoroughly, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags or as oddly idyllic as other current characters in the ill-fated pair genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan comic timing, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled way of speaking as he explains some oddities about his family-owned forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are well-matched. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in discord through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's expressions are rarely outright concealed, but they're often somewhat blocked, shown from odd angles, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of empty space. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she unwinds in the house's luxurious bath, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, as if she's about to transcend space and time. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the lodge. Her acquaintance inquires if she actually took mushrooms; Liz doesn't answer directly.

For a while, Keeper – titled after Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's world – seems like it could go in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a ghost story, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible experience? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive run 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 most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the vision) and outside the narrative; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the Final Destination-ish horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, combined with Keeper's elusive and secretive marketing, could cause the new film seem to some like a deceptive trick intended to dress up what is, fundamentally, a fairly straightforward horror story.

Maybe it is that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the manner it prioritizes its visceral effect on an viewer over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As smart as so many contemporary horror movies are, they frequently script toward message instead of shooting for instant impact. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected juxtapositions or a feeling of genuine, uncanny enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins knows just how much to advance those elements without allowing the movie to become vague woo-woo excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of doom. Liz does get freaked out by the weird things that take place around her, and the role is written and acted with a particular directness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who inexplicably avoids asking what the heck is happening.) Yet Maslany provides a additional layer to her acting in her unguarded times: a cynical flick of her eyes in one way or another, the tenuousness of her more polite grins, the shorthand of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen pal on the phone. Though no particular master clue to her painful past awaits, the figure still seems complete.

That's true of the movie as a whole, too. It's not as complex as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem satisfying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That neatness drives home some of its ideas in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a mythical horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• The film arrives in cinemas on 14 November.