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Over the past few seasons, horror cinema has frequently delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a doomed dating app. Starting with manipulated meet-cutes (New; Companion) to chronic emotional reliance (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are mostly gory nightmares, and a couple venturing to a isolated spot together signifies a fresh level of fright.

Thus it's no shock when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uncomfortable on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the recently released and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been a couple for about a year, which we learn early on has signified the period Liz has fled 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 warning signs nor as oddly perfect as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, dry sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly mumbled accent as he explains some peculiarities about his ancestral forest retreat (like the reality that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their social discomfort are complementary. They appear comfortable together.

Osgood Perkins brings in tension through his shot choices, rather than subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are seldom completely concealed, but they're often somewhat obscured, shown from odd perspectives, or composed in scenes with a unsettling amount of headroom. This creates a pattern of confusion that persists as Liz thinks she perceives faint noises through the house's vents. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an intensely unforgettable superimposition of the nearby river rushing all around her, like she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she informs a friend she phones when she's by herself at the lodge. Her friend asks if she actually took mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's assumed status as the female in Malcolm's life – appears like it could head in any number of directions, its frightening components blended in a surreal mix. Is it a supernatural tale, a forest killer movie, or just a terrible trip? Perkins, a horror specialist who has been on a productive streak for the last year and a half with another movie scheduled next year, complicates efforts to tell, both in-movie (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just out of focus or in the corner of the eye) and extra-textually; his previous movies were the stylistically different murderer freakout Longlegs and the fate-based horror comedy The Monkey. This eclecticism, paired with Keeper's mysterious and secretive marketing, could make the latest release feel to some like a deceptive trick designed to dress up what is, fundamentally, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's exactly that. But part of what renders Perkins' film so invigorating is the manner it prioritizes its physical impact on an viewer above a desire to bend that plot into a modern love allegory. As smart as so many current horror movies are, they frequently write toward message instead of shooting toward immediacy. As a result, some are starved for innovative visuals, unexpected contrasts or a feeling of authentic, strange enigma. Keeper possesses each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to advance those components without permitting the movie to turn into vague mystical excess.

He also seems to recognize what a strong stabilizing force he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the usual masterful demo reel of a female on the verge of oblivion. Liz becomes freaked out by the strange things that take place around her, and the character is written and performed with a particular straightforwardness. (She's not one of those horror heroines who mysteriously avoids inquiring what the hell is going on.) However Maslany provides a second level to her acting in her unprotected times: a skeptical glance of her eyes in one direction or another, the tenuousness of her more polite smiles, the abbreviated of both her closeness and quickness to irritation with her off-screen pal on the call. Though no particular skeleton key to her traumatic past awaits, the figure still feels fully realized.

That's true of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners nor as plot-daring as Weapons, two of 2025's leading examples for innovative horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines seem gratifying, correct and improbable to spawn a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more obvious moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: perhaps it takes a fable-like horror for the messy business of relationships to remain so neatly kept.

• Keeper debuts in theaters on 14 November.